This invention relates to the art of Asian character processing and more particularly, method and system for improving Asian character access on a personal computer.
There is a demand in the Asian font market that all characters of a font be readily accessed, displayed, stored and printed by an end user of a personal computer more efficiently.
Each Asian font is a collection of characters, representing words or concepts that include brush strokes and glyphs designed in a particular style. The written representations of each character must be unique so the reader accurately understands the concept communicated. An entire set of Asian characters in a particular font requires a large amount of disk storage space since a single Asian font, unlike roman-based languages, may contain more than 13,000 characters. Thus, because of storage limitations on a typical stand-alone computer system, an entire font is not accessible by a user.
Since, most stand-alone computers do not have sufficient storage space to store all Asian characters of a particular font, only a portion of the Asian font data (i.e. Asian characters) is stored and the remaining portion of the Asian font data must be stored on an alternative or auxiliary storage device. Therefore, the user cannot easily access all the Asian font data. What is needed is a system and method for allowing users of a personal computer to have unlimited access to the all characters of an Asian font.
The present invention is directed to overcoming the foregoing and other disadvantages. More specifically, the present invention is directed to providing a system, method, and a computer readable medium for improving Asian character access on a personal computer.
In accordance with this invention, a system, method, and a computer readable medium for improving Asian character access on a personal computer are provided. The present invention allows a user to display the large amount of data required to accurately represent, store, manipulate, print and create characters of an Asian language.
The system includes one or more personal computers and a server coupled to a public data network. The one or more personal computers include a processing device, memory, a display and a character selection device comprising inputs associated with components of Asian characters. User activation of the inputs generates a code. The server includes a processor that is coupled a database. The personal computer compares the generated code to a standard set of codes associated with Asian characters stored in the memory of the personal computer. If the Asian characters associated with the generated code are included in the standard set of codes, the associated Asian characters are displayed on the display. If a user desired character is one of the displayed associated Asian characters, the user selects the desired Asian character using the character selection device. If a user desired character is not one of the displayed associated Asian characters, the personal computer sends a character request message across the public data network to the server. The character request message inlcudes the generated code. Then, the server retrieves one or more characters from a database coupled to the server according to the generated code and sends the retrieved one or more characters to the personal computer for display.
If the Asian characters associated with the generated code are determined not to be stored on the personal computer, the personal computer sends a character request message across the public data network to the server, the character request message comprises the generated code. Then, the server retrieves one or more characters from the database coupled to the server according to the generated code, and sends the retrieved one or more characters to the personal computer for display.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, the retrieval of character information is repeated, if the characters sent and displayed to the user are not desired by the user.
In accordance with still another aspect of the present invention, the retrieval of character information retrieves a portion of characters associated with the generated code from the database. The portion is approximately 20% of the characters associated with the code stored in the database.
In accordance with still yet another aspect of the present invention, the location of a character stored in the database that is selected by the user has its storage location adjusted within the database. The adjusting rule is an 80/20 rule.
As will be readily appreciated from the foregoing summary, the invention provides a new and improved method, system and computer program product for allowing users of a personal computer to have unlimited access to all characters of an Asian font.